Photoroll Photo Printer Kiosk

Thanks to the development of mobile phones, almost all of the younger generations have cameras with increasingly better quality.
This trend makes us all self-appointed photographers.
From babies to grandparents, we all walk on the street with a camera in our pocket, ready to capture any moment of life.
The amount of pictures taken is tremendously increasing. Of course, only a fraction of these images will be printed out, but this is still a huge quantity, considering the incredible amount of mobile phones equipped with a camera.
Another question, of course, is how complicated is the printing process?
In practice, the following conditions must be met in order to print an image:

a high-quality printer is available at home;

photo paper is available;

knowledge on how to send pictures to the printer.

Another solution is to visit a service provider who can receive our pictures over the internet and send us the finished photos by ordinary post within a few days. This procedure also requires some web usage skills.

Furthermore, there are printer kiosks available, yet these are typically found in specialist shops. In general, dealing with such shops can also be complicated, yet they offer immediate results.

In contrast to the above-listed solutions, our idea is that the kiosk must be installed where the pictures are taken, in other words, there is no need to wait until the user decides to collect their pictures and go to a printing service provider, but to provide a printing opportunity right where the user experiences the event.

Based on these considerations, we set the following tasks during development:

The design of the product should be focused on people rather than a boring box of technology.

Using the kiosks should be incredibly simple. Ideally, the customer should not do anything or press buttons to get the printing job done.

It should not include unnecessary (price increasing) components, but should only be prepared to receive photos wirelessly from a mobile phone then print them out.

The quality of the printed image should be the best quality available today.

There should be no need for assistance from personnel, and the equipment should not be easy to disassemble or damage.

This is how the PHOTOROLL kiosk was designed.

The objectives have been achieved as follows:

The design resembles a moving film coil. The design also appears in the product’s logo. This makes the product unique in the market because there is no other equipment of this kind available with such a beautiful design.

The kiosk runs a management software that can wirelessly receive photos from Android and IOS devices. The owner of the mobile device selects the photos he/she wants to print out then sends them to the kiosk.

The kiosk automatically displays the pictures and provides information on the printing costs. If the user inserts the required sum, the printing starts immediately. This way, there is no need to press any buttons to use the kiosk service.

The kiosk can only receive images from mobile devices. It does not include any components that can be left out to make the unit cheaper while still keeping the unit functional. This means that we get a device with the simplest possible design, which ensures that no cheaper competitor can appear on the market.

The best quality kiosk printing can be achieved with a thermal sublimation printer – thus the kiosks feature such printers. Depending on the type of the printer, 400 to 650 images can be printed without the need to reload the paper. The printer has no ink cartridge, but uses a colour film running together with paper to achieve colouring. Accordingly, the quality of the first printed image is the same as the last one.

The kiosk has been designed for unattended operation. Individual components cannot be disassembled.

Customised colour design
The kiosk features a 17” display. It displays the images the user intends to print along with the payable amount. The design scheme of the display can be freely defined, so the colours and backgrounds of the characters used as well as the painted colour of the equipment housing can be determined to match the colour scheme of the application environment.Payment alternatives
By default, the kiosks accept metal coins (recognizing all HUF and EUR coins), but can also handle contactless (PayPass) payments if required.Technical specifications

Dimensions: 92x62x73 (H/W/D in cm)

Weight: 32 kg

Power: 400 W

Operation: indoor, between 10 and 40 degrees Celsius

Housing material: 1.5 mm steel

FOR SYSTEM INTEGRATORS
The kiosks can be supplemented with a 3G communication interface.
In this case, the units can communicate with a central server that records all their events such as failures and each individual transaction. The database can be viewed by the operating company, and it is password protected. This way, they can be easily and efficiently operated in a network.
The kiosk menu can be easily set to other languages, so it can be used abroad without any restrictions.